i read your post, couple of times and your post was a bit fuzzy on where things sit on a stack and i think i did a service to a reader who doesnt know where things sit by specifically mentioning them and where they sit on a stack.

This is a technical forum and use of appropriate technical terms should be advised where ever applicable. We all know or should know what a *nix OS is, we all know or should know where desktop environments exist in *nix systems and we all know or should what toolkits those desktop environments use. To be of service to those who are new and dont know, why not being specific to what pieces we are talking about and where they sit on a system stack?

Being fuzzy on our terms will only cause confusion to those who are in the know and will prolong the ignorance of those who want to know.

I agree but when I refer to an 'operating system' I am looking at it from a holistic end users perspective and not zooming down into the nitty gritty of the operating system itself. We can sit around and talk about the technical merits of the low level parts of the operating system but they alone do not dictate how 'good' or 'bad' an operating system. The first thing the end user will see will be the graphic user interface, then they will experience how well the integration is between the user interface and the underlying operating system by how well it can handle automounting a thumb drive and so on.

Xorg provides the layer on which the the desktop resides, to the end user if Xorg fails to provide a good experience then the end user will evaluate that the whole operating system is faulty because of that one component. We have people who do the exact same thing when it comes to Windows - they write it off because of Internet Explorer or because of a dodgy third party driver yet we never see the rush to defence as you've done in the above post - why is that?

The experience at the top leads the end user to come to conclusions about how well the over all operating system functions - they aren't going to sit back and go, "well, XOrg really sucks with the desktop residing on top really being held back but the underlying operating system is really awesome" - it just simply isn't going to happen. If the first impressions are bad then it isn't going to matter how good the low level parts of the operating system are, its evaluated as bad by the end user.

Microsoft did a whole video series at their hardware conference before Windows 7 came out about 'spit and polish' and actually getting third parties to give a crap about how their product performs on Windows. It isn't going to matter if the hardware or software is provided by a third party - if the 'computer isn't doing what I want it' (in layman's terms) then they will come to the conclusion that Windows sucks. The same can be said when evaluating any operating system - end users do not differentiate between the different layers, the different suppliers, the different companies and so forth - if the computer isn't doing what they want then it is the fault of the operating system.